I have decided to join the blogging craze. I am looking forward to taking a moment to find out a little more about the plants I have been photographing. I hope to explore all aspects of plants, flowers, trees and other garden related topics. Sorry about having to watermark the photos but there are a lot of people using them without permission.

Thursday, November 03, 2011

James Galway English Rose

English Rose

Rosa ‘James Galway’

Synonyms: Auscrystal

Another Austin Rose beauty. This rose has a nice color that gets more intense near the center of the flower and also has a nice fragrance. Like most Austin types it is easy to grow and a well behaved garden citizen.

The cleanup at the Estate continues today and will for several more days. My main strategy is to get the big stuff cut up and removed and then concentrate on doing the fine pruning and staking. It was a little disheartening to see the scale of the damage to the garden. Luckily most of the rare and prized plants seemed to get mercy from nature. I started to keep a list of the plant species that we worked on yesterday but stopped after about 4 pages in my little notebook.

Normally I can kind of say to myself “well that’s nature” and just dive into the work but couple of times yesterday I found myself a little down in the dumps thinking about all the hard work it had taken to get the plants to where they were before the storm. As an example we planted a Sugar Maple (Acer sacc. ‘Commemoration’) about 20 years ago that was just a mail order stick. Several years later we had to transplant it to present location, which it seemed to really love, and it grew into a handsome tree about 40 feet tall. When I saw it on Monday its main trunk was splintered about 8 feet from the ground and it is almost a total loss. One leader looks okay and I am going to try and save it but I don’t think it will ever recapture its former glory. The tree was in peak fall foliage before it got wasted.

Several other gardens we tend to had a lot of damage including uprooted large trees, branches on the roof and power lines and just generally crushed shrubbery. The damage is not always readily apparent and it takes a close inspection to find all of it. We are back to chainsaw heaven today.